How Canal+ ensured seamless streaming with Gatling Enterprise Edition

Why they needed Gatling: Guaranteeing quality at scale

The myCanal platform runs on a complex microservice architecture that manages authentication, licensing, catalog, DRM, and CDN distribution.

Because environments were not fully isomorphic to production, tests had to be executed directly in production—introducing significant risk.

Canal+ needed a solution capable of:

• Simulating millions of concurrent users across multiple backend services
• Validating performance under real-world event conditions such as football matches and live multiplex nights
• Coordinating load tests safely across distributed teams
• Integrating seamlessly into their existing DevOps and observability workflows

The challenge: Testing without disrupting

Initial tests revealed infrastructure limits around caching and backend throughput.

Running large-scale tests in production required fine-tuned control and real-time monitoring to prevent impact on live viewers.

The Canal+ quality engineering team, supported by Gatling, designed a progressive, iterative testing strategy—executing multiple load testing sessions, each increasing load and scope based on prior results.

The solution: End-to-end automation with Gatling Enterprise Edition

Using Gatling Enterprise Edition, Canal+ built a full-fledged, DevOps-ready performance framework.

Key implementation steps

• Test-as-Code scripting: Developers modeled realistic user journeys—login, navigation, playback—using Gatling’s Java SDs.
• Progressive load profiles: Each campaign combined multiple test types—capacity, soak, and stress—to emulate both steady usage and peak traffic.
• Infrastructure-as-Code: Gatling’s Terraform integration standardized Terraform configurations, ensuring reproducible and scalable environments where they could launch load generator on demand on a private network
• Shift-left testing: Load tests were incorporated earlier in the CI/CD cycle using GitHub actions, supported by on-demand agents and reusable test packages.
• Real-time monitoring: Metrics from Gatling dashboards were correlated with Canal+ internal observability tools for unified analysis.

This setup created a continuous performance validation loop—each test informed configuration, scaling, and caching decisions for the next.

Results: Reliability proven on the biggest stage

After successive Gatling campaigns, Canal+ achieved measurable gains:

• Increased load thresholds across all critical services
• Identified and resolved bottlenecks in caching and licensing APIs
• Improved infrastructure efficiency through optimized machine sizing
• Zero incidents during a major football broadcast serving million viewers concurrently

Beyond one-off results, Canal+ built a repeatable, automated testing methodology that now serves as a blueprint for future projects.

Next steps include extending tests to CDNs and player components for complete end-to-end validation.

The outcome: Performance testing as a shared responsibility

With Gatling Enterprise Edition, Canal+ transformed load testing from a periodic activity into a continuous engineering discipline.

Testing is now fully automated, reproducible, and integrated across teams—from QA to DevOps to backend services.

Thanks to Gatling Enterprise Edition, Canal+:

• Secured streaming performance for millions of users
• Standardized performance testing across teams
• Adopted a cloud-ready, Infrastructure-as-Code approach
• Reinforced collaboration between engineering and operations

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